Web designer opposes France’s “3 strikes” law, loses job

An employee of French broadcaster TF1 was fired after privately expressing …

He's already being called "le premier martyr d'Hadopi." Who is he? He's a 31-year old Frenchman named J�r�me Bourreau-Guggenheim, and he works in the Internet innovation division of French TV broadcaster TF1. After sending a private note to his MP opposing the proposed "three strikes" law currently being debated in France, Bourreau-Guggenheim found himself hauled into his boss' office. He was shown a copy of his e-mail, and he was fired for "strategic differences" with his employer.

The case is all over French newspapers today. Lib�rationreported the story, which began back on February 19th when Bourreau-Guggenheim decided to write his MP. He did so from a private e-mail address and told Fran�oise de Panafieu (a member of the majority UMP party) what he thought of the "Cr�ation et Internet" bill.

The bill is sometimes referred to as "HADOPI," after the French acronym for the new administrative authority that the bill would create; HADOPI would be responsible for overseeing warnings and Internet disconnections for those who repeatedly infringe online copyrights. The idea is so unpopular that 88 percent of the European Parliament this week voted to ban the practice unless overseen by a judge.

After Bourreau-Guggenheim expressed his opposition to the law, he thought no more about it until he was called into his boss' office and shown... an exact copy of his e-mail to Panafieu. According to his boss, the e-mail had been provided by the Ministry of Culture, where Minister Christine Albanel is the French government's key backer of the Cr�ation et Internet law (and also a UMP member).

But why did the Ministry of Culture have Bourreau-Guggenheim's e-mail? Because Panafieu's office had passed the message from its constituent on to the Ministry, which then passed it to TF1, which also supports the new bill.

Bourreau-Guggenheim could hardly believe it when, on April 16, he was fired from his job for "divergence forte avec la strat�gie" (strong disagreement with the strategy) of TF1.

When contacted by Le Point magazine, Albanel's advisors said that they were "tr�s choqu�s et alarm�s" by what had happened, even blaming TF1 for an overreaction.

Apparently, the Albanel people were just passing the e-mail along for informational purposes—though if that were true, one wonders why the identifying information wasn't stripped out of the message. "Truly regrettable" is certainly an understatement here, but it's the same sentiment offered by Panafieu's office, which says it merely passed the e-mail along to the Ministry of Culture because it was an "interesting argument."

No one "meant" for this to happen—but happened it has, and it's another huge black eye for UMP, which couldn't even get the bill passed on its first reading because it was outmaneuvered by the minority Socialists. Cr�ation et Internet comes up for a second vote in the National Assembly next week and looks set to pass, though the European Parliament may have other ideas when it comes to implementation.

Another nice, stinking pile of ****, created by the UMP/Sarkozy, this arrogant midget, blows up in their face. I wonder how long until he pulls a giant one and loses control over the vehicle...BTW one can only applaud the EP for teaching a lesson for this bunch of arrogant little clowns - the 3-strike nonsense has no place under the Sun, that's for sure.

If the people of France can stop this horrendous legislation, they will have won my grudging respect. I may still not be fond of them, but I will readily admit that many of the terrible things I've said about them were false.

Originally posted by Shard20X6:If the people of France can stop this horrendous legislation, they will have won my grudging respect. I may still not be fond of them, but I will readily admit that many of the terrible things I've said about them were false.

The French are actually rather nice. I have enjoyed all my trips over there. They are certainly more polite than the people I meet when I head up to New England.

One wonders what kind of recourse he has in this situation. Can his employer be sued for using allegedly private correspondence send on personal time? Is the MP liable for anything? I will be following the outcome of this with interest.

I don't think the government was explicitly responsible for this, other than circulating an email (sent in confidence) back to his employer. The situation sounds more like his employer wigged out about one of their own becoming a rabble-rouser, so they wanted to get rid of him before it happened. And in doing so, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Way to go idiots.

This is starting to sound a bit "V for Vendatta"'ish. You'd think the country that had the FRENCH Revolution, and was also repressed to no end during WW2 by Nazi Germany would, you know, lighten up.

Originally posted by Happysin:One wonders what kind of recourse he has in this situation. Can his employer be sued for using allegedly private correspondence send on personal time? Is the MP liable for anything? I will be following the outcome of this with interest.

Yes there are laws to protect him...A special court in France is used to take care of work related disputes between employers and employees which is called "Prud'hommes" people are elected, and represent both employers and employees. Also it is illegal in France to lay off someone for his/her political views. Since he used a private email address the lay off is illegal.It is actually the case since his lawyer is suing the company TF1 at the Prud'hommes but also to another french instance called "HALDE" which take care of discrimination and unfair treatment.

I don't think the government was explicitly responsible for this, other than circulating an email (sent in confidence) back to his employer.

The question is why did the government send the email to his employer ? And it is a very important question when you know that TF1 is part of the biggest media group in France and that the boss of this group is one of the witness of Sarkozy for his wedding with Carla Bruni.

Panafieu's staff acted properly as far as I can tell, they forwarded the mail to the ministry to have their answer because they thought he had good points

It's the minister's staff that did something VERY disgusting on two levels by forwarding, in turn, the mail to TF1. First, the motivation was clearly punitive. Second, it shows a level a complicity with a large corporation it oversees unbecoming of a government administration.

Then the firing is shocking in itself; but the official PR is strangely incriminating, again on two levels. First they blame him for publicly opposing the law ... but he did so *privately*! As far as I can tell so far, he didn't post in a blog or write an LTE; in other words, he's going to get a nice damage award for wrongful termination. Second, they publicly disclose in that press release that they support the law and that it's of strategic importance to them, while they have never before taken an official position. They just shot themselves in the foot IMO.

All in all, this was yet another PR disaster for the gov't, while it looked like just a month ago that the whole damn thing was going to pass under the radar.

I don't think the government was explicitly responsible for this, other than circulating an email (sent in confidence) back to his employer.

The question is why did the government send the email to his employer ?

This is where I'm at with it. I realize that the story is about France, and I'm in the U.S., but I fail to see what business it is of the government's to pass along my opinions to my employer.

If I were working for, say, Time Warner Cable and used my personal email to complain to my Congressman about the internet caps they wanted to implement, how is it even close to proper for the government to pass along the correspondence? And, setting aside the previous question a moment, what could possibly have been the purpose other than retaliation?

He couldn't have made threats, or the police would have picked him up rather than his boss firing him.

When the hell did Bush take over France? I mean if I closed my eyes, had someone read this back to be, and strip out the French and anything dealing with France I'd swear it was a another White House scandal.

Originally posted by Kempai Tai:This is where I'm at with it. I realize that the story is about France, and I'm in the U.S., but I fail to see what business it is of the government's to pass along my opinions to my employer.

If I were working for, say, Time Warner Cable and used my personal email to complain to my Congressman about the internet caps they wanted to implement, how is it even close to proper for the government to pass along the correspondence?

And this is the point when our lawsuit-happy society comes handy: no sane gov person would forward it to TWC because they know their Dept would be sued to hell and he would be fired on the spot, let alone being sued as well.

Originally posted by siliconaddict:When the hell did Bush take over France? I mean if I closed my eyes, had someone read this back to be, and strip out the French and anything dealing with France I'd swear it was a another White House scandal.

Hey look! Excessive use of foreign language phrases in an English language medium just to not so subtly say "I'm cool cos I understand French!"

I speak French, too and I always find it amusing that it's one the very few languages people go out of their way to demonstrate any proficiency. Think about it. If this story took place in Austria, Finland or Spain, you probably wouldn't have seen a single word of German, Finnish or Spanish.

originally posted by: signal11Hey look! Excessive use of foreign language phrases in an English language medium just to not so subtly say "I'm cool cos I understand French!"

Damn the author and his hubris! Can he not write a single article wherein he resists the temptation to lord his worldliness over us!?

Fluency in a foreign language is neat, something more people should work on, and a way of life pretty much everywhere outside of the US. I enjoyed the direct quotations and have no specific objections to the wanton francofication of the article.

For those asking why the email made it back to his employer, there are a couple possible scenarios:

1. He wrote his representative. Said representative forwarded it to the people proposing the law in order to get their take on it. They saw it and sent it to some media companies that are backing the bill to get their opinion and one of them happened to be the employer of the guy who wrote the email.

2. He wrote his representative. Said representative forwarded it to the people proposing the law in order to get their take on it. They saw it and realized who the guy worked for and sent it to the employer to show what kind of descent is within their rank.

Personally, I think 1. is most likely with everyone forwarding the email being dumb enough to not strip personally identifying information.

Originally posted by signal11:Hey look! Excessive use of foreign language phrases in an English language medium just to not so subtly say "I'm cool cos I understand French!"

I speak French, too and I always find it amusing that it's one the very few languages people go out of their way to demonstrate any proficiency. Think about it. If this story took place in Austria, Finland or Spain, you probably wouldn't have seen a single word of German, Finnish or Spanish.

Seconded. As a speaker of few languages - English, Spanish, some Russian and my native Hungarian - I never understood this type of dog and pony show.And I agree, it would be very hard to find any article with entire foreign sentences in any European country (sans specialty publications like minority, technical etc ones.)

Originally posted by gaosuGonglu:Fluency in a foreign language is neat, something more people should work on, and a way of life pretty much everywhere outside of the US.

Correct. However it's about a *publication*, not the way of life and as such it's NEVER written in any other language than its OFFICIAL language (sans aforementioned special cases) anywhere outside the US either AFAIK (I'm originally from Europe, I never seen any 'mixture' like this.)

You know, in the US and likely in other countries as well, if you go to a war protest rally and you work for the military, you can go to jail? But then, you're supposed to support your troops which have legislation against them having a voice... I can see how that is similar to having a job in media but not being allowed to have a voice on the related political issues.

*something* has to be done about the public piracy craze. But what do you do in a democracy where 88% of the people support pirates?

"Hey look! Excessive use of foreign language phrases in an English language medium just to not so subtly say "I'm cool cos I understand French!""

Sometimes it's best to keep the original wording. It helps prevent mistranslations. It's common in academia. Perhaps if you went to school you'd have picked up on that. Should people avoid writing in an educated manner?

@wordsworm: Simple. In a democracy where 88% of the constituents support piracy, it's no longer piracy - it's "the common good."

Really, the only reason that these problems are so big now is that "Big Content" is very well organized, and knows exactly who and when to talk to the state governments. If governments did not listen to industry lobbyists, or if they placed their constituents first, you can bet we wouldn't be having near the amount of controversy.

Originally posted by Shard20X6:If the people of France can stop this horrendous legislation, they will have won my grudging respect. I may still not be fond of them, but I will readily admit that many of the terrible things I've said about them were false.

The French are actually rather nice. I have enjoyed all my trips over there. They are certainly more polite than the people I meet when I head up to New England.

One wonders what kind of recourse he has in this situation. Can his employer be sued for using allegedly private correspondence send on personal time? Is the MP liable for anything? I will be following the outcome of this with interest.

I can't really say anything bad about the french people having only met two, and they were rather nice,but as far as people from New England, yeah I agree We are bunch of rude bastards.

Originally posted by wordsworm:Sometimes it's best to keep the original wording. It helps prevent mistranslations. It's common in academia. Perhaps if you went to school you'd have picked up on that. Should people avoid writing in an educated manner?

Hi, thanks for condescending!

Anyway, you're missing the point. Removing ambiguity by using select phrases is fine and is the norm in many different written forms, particularly academic publishing. However, this is not the case in this article. What was done here, quoting entire sentences in French and giving an invasive plus ou moins translation, was not done to preserve the original meaning. It was done by the author as a demonstration of his competency in French. I know this because I used to do this. And then I grew up.

-signal11, BA, BS, MSE, MPH

PS For what it's worth, I speak four languages fluently, two of them natively, with a working proficiency in a smattering of a few more. I haven't felt a need to flaunt that in a long time, but I have a feeling you're one of these guys who's impressed by that kind of thing.

I found the French in the article to be incredibly distracting, which made the article, in my opinion, look poorly written. This isn't the first article I have seen here that does this.

And just to appease all of the "go to school", "learn another language", "experience another country" assholes: I went to school, I'm an expatriate who speaks his native language and the language of the country he lives in.